Award-Winning Poet Frank Bidart to Read

Frank Bidart, a recipient of the Academy of American Poets' prestigious Wallace Stevens Award, will give a reading at Bryn Mawr on Friday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m. in the Ely Room of Wyndham Alumnae House.

Free and open to the public, Bidart's appearance at Bryn Mawr is part of the College's yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series, which features critically acclaimed poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights. For further information, contact the Office for the Arts at 610-526-5210.

Bidart's poetry was described by the 2001 jury chair of the Stevens Award as " .remarkable in its disdain for the soothing, the sentimental, the facile, the partial." The poet has won honors for his work since the 1973 publication of his first volume, Golden State, which was selected by Richard Howard for the Braziller Poetry Series. The Sacrifice, five long poems including "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky," a mixture of poetry and prose about the dancer's obsession with the tragedies of World War I, received The Paris Review's first Bernard F. Connors Prize. His fifth volume, Desire, was a finalist for the National Book Award, nominee for a Pulitzer Prize and recipient of both the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize.

His newest book, Star Dust, incorporates poems from an earlier volume, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook named a Pulitzer finalist. Bidart also received the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America.

The reading is supported by a gift from Bryn Mawr alumna Florence Newman Trefethen '43, by the Whitehill-Linn Fund and by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

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